Reflections: Highway Robbery

Confessions of a roadside bulb-runner

James Fox-Smith

Another spring: another February spent serving as accessory-after-the-fact to some low-grade horticultural larceny. This is the time of year when my wife’s bulb habit flares up and she begins prowling the roads of the Felicianas and Wilkinson County. Far from abating as she grows—er, wiser— the annual impulse that grips her to extend her holdings of Campernelles, Texas Stars, and other varieties of Narcissus seems to expand in ambition and scope with each blooming season. For twelve years and counting, each winter her driving trends towards the erratic as her attention drifts to the roadside shoulders and ditches, which she scans with a gimlet eye that would startle anyone who knows her as a lifelong wearer of eyeglasses. Don’t be fooled. My wife possesses X-ray vision—a sixth sense preternaturally evolved to identify the telltale clump of foliage a stand of Thalias sends forth as it emerges from hibernation. Miraculously for one whose less-than-perfect vision apparently prevents her from reading the instructions for any electronic device, this superpower renders her capable of spotting a four-inch frond of greenery protruding from a ditchful of dirty water while driving by at seventy miles per hour. Upon identifying a target, this normally law-abiding citizen has been known to execute a blackout-inducing U-turn across four lanes of traffic, retrieve the sharp-shooter shovel that lives in her trunk, and imperturbably set about separating the clump from its surroundings before any onlooker could say “Byzantine Gladiolus.” Sometimes, if during a reconnaissance mission she identifies a promising patch that she is unable to access for some reason, the following weekend she’ll recruit me to serve as her getaway driver, returning her to the cased location so she can seal the deal. Back home, the new acquisitions will be solemnly incorporated into her “bulb meadow,” a swathe of onetime pasture beside the driveway that, after a decade’s worth of bulb-napping, welcomes us home on buttery waves of blooms early each spring.

Admittedly the end result of all this roadside scavenging makes quite a statement. But while my wife (mostly) confines her bulb collecting activities to lightly-trafficked roadsides and remote woods and fields, there's still something about sitting in an idling pickup truck in full view of the motoring public while one’s life partner roots about in the undergrowth with a shovel that makes me kind of self-conscious. Luckily for me, the places where these stands of bulbs appear tend to be lightly inhabited these days. Drive the back roads of the Felicianas or Wilkinson County in January and February and you’re likely to spot stands of early Narcissus and Jonquils adding their delicate dabs of yellow to unpeopled patches of countryside. Who put them there? While their distribution might seem natural at first glance, a curious uniformity often reveals that a house once stood on the site—so me farmhouse long since consumed by fire or termites, engulfed by the forest, or maybe a combination of all three—its former existence discernible only by the stands of bulbs that emerge each spring to mark where some long-departed gardener once fussed over border beds or a front walk. Look closely in January and February and you’ll find “ghost gardens” like these throughout the countryside. Their presence is a reminder of the folk who preceded us in this part of the country, and of nature’s extraordinary power to render our efforts ephemeral, while simultaneously sending forth annual reminders of those who’ve tried to tame it.

This might be why gardening appeals so strongly to Ashley. After all, she lives in a house built by her great, great grandfather, and the patch of land it stands on has been tended by generations of her forbears. Her great grandparents were apparently keen gardeners, who divided the yard into his and hers: she did perennials in the front yard while he concentrated on annuals in the back. Sometimes when my wife turns up a patch of lawn in some long-neglected corner of the backyard, she disturbs a cache of annual seeds that has lain dormant for seventy years or more, awakening a spray of Pansy or Impatiens blossoms that feels a bit like a message from her great-grandpa, smiling at her across time.